Free Glory Road by Bruce Catton Page B

stirred infernal fires." An indignant general routed one straggler out of a ditch and ordered him to rejoin his command. The straggler saluted and said: "General, I will, jest as soon as them fellers quit throwin' railroad iron at us." And back on the far side of the Rappahannock the chaplain of a Pennsylvania regiment, returning to camp with some wounded men, told the contraband cook of the regimental officers' mess to take some hot coffee over to the embattled regiment. The contraband, looking wide-eyed at the flashing shells that were exploding all over the plain, shook his head emphatically. "I'se not gwine up dar whar so many big stars are busting!" 11
    It was at times like this that the Civil War officer was supposed to display a dramatic disregard of danger. To keep his troops steady he had to expose his own person; he had to do it with an air, as if to show that he simply was not aware that there was any danger. The boys of the 16th Maine, growing restive under the cannonade, presently found themselves gaping at Captain James Hall, who had his 2nd Maine battery drawn up in action beside them and who was blithely sitting his horse, carrying on a conversation with the 16th's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Charles W. Tilden, and the brigadier, Colonel Adrian Root, who were on their horses a dozen yards away from him. Since the air was full of truly deafening noise, the three officers had to shout at the top of their lungs to make themselves heard, but aside from that they might have been three civilian horsemen who had met on a bridle path in a park on a pleasant May morning and were stopping to pass the time of day.
    While the soldiers hugged the ground and watched admiringly, a Rebel shell came whistling in between Captain Hall and the two colonels, narrowly missing the colonels and going on to crash into a caisson in the rear, exploding it with an earth-rocking crash. Captain Hall looked faintly annoyed. Very deliberately he dismounted, walked over to one of his guns, and painstakingly sighted it at the Rebel battery which had fired the shot. Satisfied, he stepped back and waved his hand to the gun crew. The gun was fired and landed a direct hit, dismounting a Rebel gun amid a cloud of torn earth and flying splinters. The battery commander walked back to his horse, mounted, and resumed the interrupted conversation as if nothing had happened. 12
    Such dramatics might help to make shell fire endurable, but in the end the battle would be decided by what the infantry did. By noon or thereabouts the Federal gunners had beaten the Confederate gunfire down just enough so that the infantry could go forward. Meade took his division into a ragged patch of woodland along the edge of the railroad track, Gibbon went into the fringe of the same woodland a little later and a little farther north, and the artillerists let their guns cool while the foot soldiers fought in the swampy underbrush. Meade's division by good fortune stumbled into a gap in Jackson's lines and for a short time made great headway, crumpling up a couple of A. P. Hill's brigades, killing one of his brigadiers, taking prisoners, and just for a moment making it look as if Burnside's battle plan might make sense after all. But although there were more than sixty thousand armed Federals on this plain south of Fredericksburg (one of Hooker's two corps had been sent down here as insurance), these two divisions seemed to be all that Franklin could get into action. The Army of the Potomac was up against its old, old difficulty: visibly outnumbering its enemy, it nevertheless was put into action in such a way that where the actual fighting was going on there were more Rebels present than Yankees. Stonewall Jackson sent in fresh troops, and the Federal assault columns were smashed and came running back into the open, hotly pursued. Across the open plain, shaken by the blast of many guns, there rose the high unearthly keen of the Rebel yell.
    That yell - "that hellish yell,"